If you had any doubt that Bernie Sanders (I-USSR) was an actual Communist, doubt no longer. The guy who stands ready in case Old Joe retires and the Democrats opt to pick another octogenarian Leftist sat down Friday for a chat with Chris Wallace on HBO Max, and declared that if someone earns more than $999 million in a given year, the U.S. government should seize all of it. That’s right: all of it. Not 90 percent. Every last penny. And he showed no indication of having any idea why this policy, if it were ever enacted, would kill the economy and leave non-billionaires worse off than they were before. Or maybe, given the unanimous record of socialist states, that’s the idea.
The UK’s far-Left Guardian reported Tuesday that the trouble started when the failed CNN host Wallace asked the twice-failed presidential candidate Sanders about a statement in the old Commie’s book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Sanders, by the way, receives royalties for that book, and there is no cap on the income he can earn; if it becomes a bestseller, he will get more money. At no point will anyone step in and tell Bernie, who owns three houses, that he is making too much money, and has to turn over the rest to the wise Leftist bureaucrats who will duly redistribute it to those in need.
Wallace asked Sanders about his declaration in that book that “billionaires should not exist.” He asked the old leech: “Are you basically saying that once you get to $999m that the government should confiscate all the rest?” Sanders unabashedly owned up to backing systematic and organized grand theft, replying: “Yeah. You may disagree with me but, fine, I think people can make it on $999m. I think that they can survive just fine.” This is precisely the kind of deceptive argument that Leftists love to use in order to justify their evil and inhumane policies.
In reality, there is no doubt that Bernie Sanders is right: people with 999 million dollars will do just fine. But that is not the only aspect of this scenario that needs to be considered. Bernie started to rail against Walmart, claiming, according to the Guardian, that it “in many cases pays starvation wages to its 1.2 million employees.” Sanders asserted that “many of their workers are on Medicaid or food stamps. In other words, taxpayers are subsidizing the wealthiest family in the country. Do I think that’s right? No, I don’t.”
This betrayed Bernie’s failure to understand basic economics. He deplores the idea that Walmart workers are collecting government benefits; apparently he believes that the Walton family, which owns the retail giant, should pay better wages so that the government doesn’t have to offer welfare benefits to Walmart employees. All right. But he was saying all this in the context of explaining why he thinks that wages after a certain point should be confiscated entirely by the government. If that plan were implemented, the Waltons would have less money. It would be more difficult for them to pay the wages Sanders is demanding, and the government would have to take up the slack with the money it confiscated. So Sanders’ proposal would end up reinforcing the system he hates.
Impervious to logic and common sense, Sanders insisted: “You can have a vibrant economy without [a few] people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society.” He said that if he ever becomes Dear Leader, er, that is, president, “if you make a whole lot of money, you’re going to pay a whole lot of money.”
Related: California Goes Full Communist: Utilities to Base What They Charge on How Much You Make
On the surface it sounds just, and that’s why it takes in superficial thinkers such as Sanders’ friend and acolyte Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But Sanders shows no appreciation of the fact that the billionaires he wants to rob are the people who provide jobs for those who aren’t billionaires. If the rich can only earn a certain amount by law, they’ll go to other countries where they can keep more of what they earn, or they simply will not produce as much. Why should they, if the government is going to take it all?
The ones who suffer from all this socialism in the end will be the poor about whom Sanders claims to care. The places where they might have worked will have gone to other countries that offer a more favorable tax structure. The people who might have started a company that would have employed them will have no incentive to do so. That’s why socialist countries are always economic basket cases, and always will be.
Sanders has every reason to know this. He loves Communism so much that back in 1988, he and his new bride honeymooned in the Soviet Union, apparently delighted to visit a totalitarian state that imprisoned and enslaved its own people. Brute force is the only way you can force people to work if they have no economic incentive to work hard. That’s the paradise this old Commie envisions for the country that used to be known as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
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